Review Rundown: The One Where We Play In The Garden

Play. Art. Technology. Fun. Wonder. Worldwide.

These are some of our watchwords here at NoPro, and this week brings us all these and a bit more. From online escape games and mysteries in Singapore to site specific art inside botanical gardens, this week’s Rundown is a classic grab bag filled with the kinds of things that spark joy for us here in the heart of the immersiverse. Let’s get to it.

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Gallery of Secrets: The Lost Lily — The Theatre Practice 实践剧场
$38–84; Remote (Website); Current Run Concluded

There’s a cheeky thrill to artistically reappropriating the prosaic. The fact that The Theatre Practice has made theatrical hay of 3D landscape cameras and software designed to facilitate online real estate tours is inherently charming. Gallery of Secrets: The Lost Lily is structurally quite similar to its predecessor, The Bride Always Knocks Twice, combining video, live interviews, and 3D tours of spaces (in this case the gorgeous National Gallery of Singapore). The plot is a DaVinci Code meets National Treasure adventure seeking a fabled fortune lost in a war-ravaged Asia.

Two slight wrinkles emerged that, despite enjoying the format, gave me pause. First, by separating the event into multiple stages, with additional scheduling in the middle of the event, bookings became a logistics nightmare. Time zones were sporadically given; this led to many confusing moments, questioning whether I’d signed up for a 9 AM or 9 PM slot.

More ambivalently, I worry that the plot’s reliance on knowledge of rumors and historical legends unique to Singapore worked for international audiences. While the opportunity to learn the persistent myth of the Golden Lily treasure, a cache of gold hidden by the defeated Japanese towards the end of WWII was welcome, it clearly was another puzzle to foreign audiences, added to an already challenging set. This made the time crunch of the puzzles more stressful. While monstrous war criminal Tomoyuki Yamashita obviously lives in infamy, Western audiences are likely unfamiliar enough to know about him (or his legendary treasure) just by first name, as we were expected to.

Either way, I’m still excited by The Theatre Practice. They attempt new frontiers in international immersive theatre, and have proven a mastery of the mystery genre across multiple productions. Who am I to complain if they overwhelm me sometimes? That only proves their abundance.

— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large

A Grimm Night — Transcen|Dance Project
$73.45-$113.00; Toronto, Ontario, CA; Run Concluded

Like many performances set for a 2020 release, A Grimm Night, Transcen|Dance Project’s latest show, found itself with a premiere date a little later than scheduled. The production, a retelling of several Grimm’s fairy tales, features a cast of 11 dancers, including legendary Canadian ballerina Evelyn Hart.

Upon arrival, an usher provided me with a white Colombina mask, used to differentiate the audience from the actor à la Punchdrunk. A wax-sealed envelope informed me of my starting destination — which I erroneously ended up diverging from. No matter — regardless of the space I found myself in, a character or plot line wove its way into the scene.

Originally set to take place within an abandoned building, A Grimm Night established a new home in the multiple rooms, stairwells, and corridors of Toronto’s Great Hall. Staging was minimal, but effective, as the venue is a historical space with fitting character. However, I did find myself wishing we had access to even more of the upstairs portions of the building, or that out of bounds areas had been hidden from view to preserve the immersive nature of the experience.

Like many open-world immersive experiences, I would have loved to have had the time and ability to map out the entirety of each character’s storyline. However, the show’s two-hour run time, during which the story looped at least once, was a sufficient amount of time to explore this dark storybook world.

A Grimm Night is an engaging production with a talented cast, beautiful choreography, and a familiar yet intriguing storyline. As I exited the venue, a wave of tiredness washed over me. Apparently, running up and downstairs in chase of a trio of faeries can be a workout, but the experience is well worth the effort!

— Katrina Lat, Toronto Correspondent

Raid The Room: Escape The Island — Gather x Raid The Room
Free; Gather (Web Browser); Available Anytime

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Gather, the pixel art based meeting platform whose game-like interface is a welcome relief from the boxy sameness of Zoom, has been a go-to for experimenting immersive creators pretty much since it arrived on the scene in 2020.

For much of the time since creators have had to make do with the tools Gather had, or create elaborate workarounds using the platform’s API. That seems to be changing with the arrival of Raid The Room: Escape The Island.

The team building game company, which has its roots in escape games, has worked with the help of Gather’s team to build a very fun multiplayer escape game that leverages Gather’s interface with its game-like aesthetic and video chat functionality to create an experience that brings all the collab gaming feels with a minimal amount of tech drag.

The puzzles are a good mix of classics — Blake was shouting out the puzzle types and blazing through them in the opening scene — and elements that are more at home in a point and click adventure game. All in all a good balance that uses the strengths of the platform to deliver a good time for up to six players for the grand price of ZERO. It’s also a great signpost for what Raid The Room can get up to on the Gather platform and a lesson for all those would be metaverse platform kings out there: create some games to get people playing on your platform or just pack it in now. No one wants to hang out in a mall without an arcade anymore.

— Noah J. Nelson, publisher

The Twenty-Sided Tavern — The Twenty-Sided Tavern/Gamiotics
$28-$49.75; Pittsburgh, PA; Through April 30th

The Twenty-Sided Tavern rolls into Pittsburgh with a valiant effort to combine the tabletop role-playing experience with immersive theatre production values. The experience was — as any good role playing game session is — hit and miss. The cast of the experience, like characters in a game, had their failures along the way, but ultimately were successful in their quest to provide an entertaining evening of adventure.

One critical failure of the night was related to cumbersome technology integration; the mobile phone platform was at first quite buggy and more than a few audience members (including our party) had initial trouble connecting or staying connected to the interactive site. Nevertheless, the cast came up with an analog solution to the problem by asking for a show of hands while the tech was fixed behind the scenes, and the adventure continued.

From an immersive perspective, the degree to which you could participate was well balanced: you could ignore the interactivity completely; vigorously vote through their device; call out responses to cast prompts; or volunteer to get up on stage and drink mystery liquids. Collectively the audience truly had the power to shape the outcomes of the narrative — but to that point, the audience for this event were significantly well traveled Dungeons & Dragons nerds, and the immersion broke down in several places when the players and the game-master appeared to be unclear as to the rules of the game. On more than one occasion, an audience member called out a mechanical correction. If the premise of your narrative is that you’re playing a session of a well-known game, know your stuff.

Still, there is ample opportunity for the production to level up, and every session is a new adventure. Overall, the experience was engaging and enjoyable and certainly worth beholding.

— Adam Lee and Lelia Morgan, Pittsburg Correspondents

Your (Un)natural Garden — Adam Schwerner at Descanso Gardens
$5-$15 included in garden admission; La Canada Flintridge;
through Jan 8, 2023

This site-specific art installation unfolds over three parts of the historic Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. A series of large sculptural pieces dubbed The Snakeways marks the path uphill to the Sturt Haaga Gallery and the Boddy House, the 1938 residence which belonged to the family who founded the botanical gardens. It is in those two spaces that the more interactive part of the installation reside.

The three pieces in the gallery are the most robust of the show, each a multi-sensory delight that mixes the glaringly obvious with subtle details you might not clock on a cursory examination. Scents were devised with the aid of The Institute of Art and Olfaction in LA (although if you stay in your mask, as I did when others were present, you might miss this bit) while the element of sound in the pieces is each approached with an ingenious verve. See if you can hear just what is happening in the room where Zeppelin Mass resides. It’s not at all obvious but can be puzzled out.

What makes Your (Un)natural Garden pop is the mix of the meditative and the playful. From chairs loaded up with springs that dare you to sit on them to The Uncomfy Room which has rave chill room vibes offset by what sounds like the digestive tract of something mildly inhuman. Any given piece has multiple dimensions going on at once, and also invites just tuning into the present moment.

Artist Adam Schwerner and his collaborators at JUST Design, Art Mafia, and Pink Sparrow have crafted all this will salvaged and upcycled material that was otherwise destined straight for the landfill. This (un)natural contrast with the beauty of Descanso Gardens itself. To my shame I hadn’t been to Descanso Gardens which, as it turns out, was a previous mistake as the grounds remind me of my favorite park and gardens in the Berkeley Hills only at a much larger scale.

Honestly: it’s worth thinking about an annual membership. PROTIP: when you visit, go check out the nearby Crumbl Cookies. You can thank/curse me later.

— Noah J. Nelson, publisher

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